Tag: Vanuatu

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Don’t Waste Your Life – MP3s from Vanuatu

In Vanuatu, my main responsibility was to lead the group Bible study each day. It was such an encouraging time! The Schoolies were a solid bunch of Christians and so they loved spending time in the Word as a large group, in smaller groups and in quiet times. The series we did was called “Don’t Waste Your Life”. The aim was to think through how to spend the rest of our lives by investing in things that matter. While some material was borrowed from John Piper’s great book by the same name, it was more or less a study of Ephesians and what it says about God’s purposes for his people.

only one life it'll soon be past, only what's done in Christ will last

Ultimately the series is all about Jesus. God is at work in the world to bring all things under the rule of Jesus (Eph 1:9-10). A life on purpose is a life lived trusting in and living for Jesus. I was personally encouraged to “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, descended from David, this is my gospel…” (2 Timothy 2:8) Here are the MP3s:

  1. You’ve got ONE SHOT – Ecclesiastes
  2. GLORIFY Jesus – Ephesians 1 & 3
  3. GATHER with Jesus – Ephesians 2-3
  4. GROW in Jesus – Ephesians 4-5
  5. GIVE like Jesus – Ephesians 4
  6. GOSPEL of Jesus – Ephesians 6
  7. GLAD in Jesus – Ephesians 5
  8. Remember JESUS – 2 Corinthians 4; Hebrews 12 & 2 Timothy 2:8 (includes Communion)

Here’s a training session I did too: Encouragise, Empathise, Evangelise

Were you on Schoolies? Let us know how you were encouraged and challenged. Got any questions? Leave them in the comments or contact me.

This is the 3rd time I’ve done this series. Here’s one and two. I think it improved!

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Vanuatu vs. Fitness First

I had a mild case of reverse culture shock at 615 this morning while walking through Babylon. The destination? Techno-drum-and-bass-exercise-bike class @ the gym. For the 45 pulsating minutes of the class, I couldn’t stop making comparisons between Vanuatu and Fitness First. It started with differences, but then I also noticed some similarities.

Living for the sake of others

Differences:

  • People are friendly in Vanuatu.
  • Fitness First is more ordered than Vanuatu: all the treadmills, bikes and crazy spacewalkers face the TV screens; all the bikes in the cycle studio face the instructor; and all the weights face the mirror.
  • The small physiotherapy practice at Fitness First is better resourced than the best hospital in Vanuatu.
  • It took 9 days to lose 4 kilos in Vanuatu. It takes about 9 weeks to do the same in Fitness First.
  • Fitness First is all about me. Vanuatu is all about serving others (see pic above).
  • The check in process at Fitness First is more stringent than the airport in Port Vila.
  • Fitness First is littered with advertisements for various products. As far as I could tell, Digicel dominate ALL the advertising space in Vanuatu.

Similarities:

  • You need to drinks lots of water in both places.
  • I had a cold shower in both places.
  • We all pay homage to someone or something. (Check who you pay homage to: part 1, part 2, part 3)
  • Pastor Brown stood at the door to shake hands with all his parishioners in the Presbyterian Church we went to on Sunday morning. So did the Fitness First Spiritual Leader (class instructor) on our way out of the studio!

Can you think of any more?

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Don’t Waste Your Life Watching Television and Surfing The Internet

I’ve just got back from a Schoolies trip to Vanuatu with Scripture Union. It was an incredible time. Stay tuned for a bunch of blog posts with some reflections. The topic was “Don’t Waste Your Life”, I spoke from Ephesians about God’s purposes for his people. While reading Don’t Waste Your Life, by John Piper (available for free), I was challenged to think about the time I waste on the Internet. We don’t have a television, but it’s very easy to waste precious hours on the internet that then nullifies the decision to not have a TV. It was liberating to not go online while in Vanuatu!

vila vanuatu mural t-shirt

Here’s a snippet from Piper (p. 120-121 DWYL):

Television is one of the greatest life-wasters of the modern age. And, of course, the Internet is running to catch up, and may have caught up. You can be more selective on the Internet, but you can also select worse things with only the Judge of the universe watching. TV still reigns as the great life-waster. The main problem with TV is not how much smut is available, though that is a problem. Just the ads are enough to sow fertile seeds of greed and lust, no matter what program you’re watching. The greater problem is banality. A mind fed daily on TV diminishes. Your mind was made to know and love God. Its facility for this great calling is ruined by excessive TV. The content is so trivial and so shallow that the capacity of the mind to think worthy thoughts withers, and the capacity of the heart to feel deep emotions shrivels. Neil Postman shows why.

What is happening in America is that television is transforming all serious public business into junk. . . . Television disdains exposition, which is serious, sequential, rational, and complex. It offers instead a mode of discourse in which everything is accessible, simplistic, concrete, and above all, entertaining. As a result, America is the world’s first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.

Postman’s cultural critique, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, is brilliant. Go here to download Piper’s book.

Stay tuned for more Vanuatu posts!!